Yvonne Conde

Bio

I’m a Manhattan-based author, freelance journalist, columnist and television producer. Back at the American Dominican Academy in Havana, Patti D. and I would sit and cut cartoons from Bohemia magazine, paste them onto a sheet of paper and write “stories.” We’d sell them for three cents. Thus began my career as a storyteller. As a behavioral reward Papi would buy me a book every weekend and like little girls everwhere, Sissi, Heidi, and Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy from Mujercitas (or Little Women) became my best friends.

On August 1961, after my homeland’s communist takeover, my parents put me alone on a Pan Am airplane, and sent me out of Cuba to Miami. It was not until 1990, while pursuing a Master of Journalism degree at NYU, that I discovered that I was one of 14,048 unaccompanied Cuban children sent to the US between 1960 and 1962. This motivated me to write Operation Pedro Pan-The Untold Exodus of 14,048 Cuban Children (Routledge 1999), translated into Spanish by Random House in 2001.

Random House also published my La Sabiduría de los Nuestros, a compilation of over 1,000 quotes by Hispanics (2006). I’ve contributed to these anthologies: Encyclopedia of Cuba by Greenwood Publishing Group (2003) Cuba Mia, Editorial Zun Zun (2003) and Pan American World Airways- Aviation History through the Words of its People, Bluewater Press (2011).

For three years, I wrote a weekly socio-political column for New York City’s HOY, a Spanish language newspaper, and was a former contributing editor for Hispanic Business magazine. My articles have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines such as The Miami Herald, Craig’s, Editor & Publisher, The New York Sun, Latina and Vista, among many others.

One of my favorite NYC haunts is the 42nd Street library where I can in dig tilI drop. I have been a researcher for Black and White in Exile, a four-part series for PBS and Agenda for the Americas for WPIX, NY. I won a Best News and Public Affairs Work prize for the documentary Journeys to New York-The Immigrant Experience Today as as a writer/producer. I’ve also been a panelist and a featured guest in many television and radio programs as well as documentaries.

I am convinced that I suffer from a severe case of wanderlust. Crisscrossing the globe as a Pan Am stewardess before settling down to get my graduate degree helped somewhat, but my husband, Dr. Bernabé Loret de Mola and I can still be found boarding planes several times a year.

Currently working on a novel about an unusual aristocrat that takes place in Victorian England.